The Future of Remote Working

Here’s what I’ve been up to.

The Future of Remote Working

This project was developed during the Design Thinking module, at Hyper Island. I was part of a team of 6 people, from 6 different countries: Canada, UK, Sweden, Philippines, Italy, and Portugal.

Our client for this module was Mural, a cloud collaborative tool that helps remote teams work on creative projects. Mural challenged us to design the “future of remote working”, with the goal of making people feel closer and smarter together.

Although the team members came from different backgrounds, we all, in one way or another, had experienced the challenges of working remotely and were aware of how it can impact one’s efficiency and motivation. Thus, this was an issue we were very keen to address. We started by gaining an understanding of what it means to work remotely nowadays. We did this by reflecting upon our own experiences, gathering information via a survey, interviewing remote workers at co-working spaces and analysing online testimonials. Furthermore, and because the challenge required us to imagine the future, we researched the trends and projections of what lies ahead for remote ways of working and the workforce more broadly.

The Double Diamond – Design Thinking

After collecting and thoroughly analysing all this information, we identified three key insights:

1) People who work remotely tend to feel lonely and seek human interaction, but love the freedom to change location whenever they want.
2) Remote working is here to stay: millennials will account for 75% of the workforce by 2025, and 75% of them would rather work remotely.
3) Millennials prefer having access to things to owning them and the global sharing economy (business concept that highlights the ability to rent or borrow goods rather than buy and own them) revenues could hit $335 billion by 2025.

With this in mind, throughout the course of four weeks, we brainstormed dozens of ideas. After putting some careful thought and hard imaginative work behind the three ideas with the strongest potential, we finally chose our winner: Remote Work Air.

THE RESULT

Remote Work Air allows mobile remote workers to fill their need for social interaction, by offering an informal environment where they work independently while connecting with other remote professionals, in their hometown or abroad.

The remote worker (particularly millennials and digital nomads) uses this service to find other professionals who feel isolated because of their professional lifestyle. Through the platform, users can find like-minded people who have a safe home office environment and are available to host them. This is especially important as it avoids distractions and technical problems often experienced / reported at cafés and typical / traditional remote working spaces. Security issues are resolved by identity verification prior to using the service.